#jenny staff johnson
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
It was Spring Break 2005 and I had come to Marfa alone with my boys, the youngest barely two, the oldest not yet four. We had a little suite at the Hotel Paisano and planned to see friends and take in the scenery while my husband stayed home to work. We spent our days walking the dusty streets, waiting for the train to pass by so we could wave to it, waking up way before dawn and waiting for someplace to open that sold coffee, looking up at the sky. Waiting and walking was the most of it. I was bored, but happy to be bored in Marfa instead of bored at home, like usual. One spot of excitement: the older boy had gotten in over his head in the hotel swimming pool; I had had to fling off my cowboy boots and jump into the water in my jeans while a group of men arrayed around the edge of the pool sat and watched. That night the jeans hung heavily from the shower rod and dripped loudly onto the bathroom floor.
The town of Marfa, Texas, is known for magic, and has been known to give gifts: glimpses of the famed Mystery Lights, transcendent experiences of land and sky, life-changing encounters with art and tumbleweeds. Such was its beneficence the day I walked down its dusty main drag and found a flyer on the door of the Marfa Book company announcing an appearance that night by the writer Grace Paley, one of a handful of American authors who changed my life in college. Her work made me want to be a writer, her nervy authorial voice ringing clear as a bell through the noise of life and undergrad lit. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. How could anyone resist that title? How perfect for a young person about to graduate, about to be loosed at last upon the world under my own recognizance. Or for a young mother of two boys born within nineteen months, which is what I was by the time I saw her name on the bookstore door.
Looking back, I see how much of a wreck I was back then. The deadening sameness of our days paired with sleep deprivation meant I walked around Marfa—and for that matter the whole wide world—in a daze. Before my childbearing days, I had preoccupations similar to Paley’s— a life dominated by writing and politics as a journalist covering state and local government in Austin. Hastily quitting my job as a wire service stringer upon giving birth, I found myself adrift in, sometimes even drowning in, new motherhood, stripped of the things that formerly animated my life. Adding to my disorientation, at this very same time, George W. Bush, a reasonably moderate Texas Governor back when I was on the beat, had gone on to become president, transforming into a prosecutor of enhanced interrogation and formulator of the axis of evil. I no longer knew which end was up, neither in my life nor in the world. This cognitive dissonance would crescendo a few months later with Hurricane Katrina, but I didn’t know that yet. What I did know was that this particular author turning up at this particular moment felt like a communique from my old life, her name echoing loud enough to penetrate the static in my head.
So that evening I packed up my toddlers and headed to the bookstore. Here is what I remember about that night: Grace Paley was there, in the front of a packed room. She was so short I could hardly see her over the crowd. She was gray-haired and simply dressed. She was eighty-two years old. She was talking about the Iraq war, about the importance of peace. Or maybe it was the necessity of protest, it was hard to hear much, with all of my whispering at the kids to keep still. I don’t remember much else, not where we went after, not what I drank (I would have been drinking something) alone in the hotel suite after I got them down for the night, so early in the evenings of normal people. In the end we had managed all of five minutes in the back of that crowded bookstore before the agitation of the toddlers demanded my retreat. I wanted more, but it was not to be.
When I first encountered Grace Paley’s work I was simply dazzled by her talent, but now, as a mother who fights for time and space to write every day while my kids are at school, I see how how high the stakes of her life and work were, how high they are for all of us, and how hard we need to fight to stay in the game.
Time and time again I have returned in my mind to the day I fought the exigencies of new motherhood for a few moments in her presence, just as I have returned to writing season after season, to life on the page in whatever form. I still treasure the moment when she appeared like some literary mirage in the high desert. However dimly I recognized it at the time, it was a sign that my old life was still out there, somewhere. It sought me out that day in Marfa, then it winked and walked away, promising to come back later.
Recommended Reading
- Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Grace Paley
- Conversations with Grace Paley, Gerhard Bach and Blaine, Hall, eds.
- Silences, Tillie Olsen (stumbled across years later at Marfa Book Company, the same shop at which I saw Ms. Paley, and mentioned in the book above.)
Jenny Staff Johnson is a journalist and former political ghostwriter who, after years away, has returned to fiction at what seems like the last minute but probably isn’t. Recent fiction has been published in New Dead Families and recent nonfiction in Houstonia Magazine. She lives in Houston and can be found online at twitter.com/htownjenny.
